Originally, computing systems were extremely expensive and bulky, thereby limiting their impact on our daily lives. Advancements in technology, however, have progressively and dramatically reduced the cost and size of computing systems while also greatly increasing the speed and computing power of the systems. Increasingly, more and more aspects of our lives have come to include some computer element within it. Indeed, computing systems have revolutionized modern life.
To take advantage of benefits potentially available through use of computing systems, computer users must be able to interact with their computers, to input the necessary information and/or data and to receive the desired output from the computer. In recent years, great advances also have been made in providing a friendly interface for communication between a user and the computing system. Graphical user interfaces (“GUIs”), like those used in connection with computer programs operating on a WINDOWS® based computer operating system (available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.), have become a popular choice for computer users. In such GUIs, a computer user may easily input and manipulate information in a computing system using a keyboard and/or a mouse-type input device (including trackballs, roller balls, and other similar input devices).
Other technological advances have further expanded the manner in which computer users interact with their computing systems. Recently, stylus-based computing systems have become popular in which users interact with their computing systems using a pen or pencil shaped “stylus” to input and/or manipulate information. Examples of such stylus-based computing systems include personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) and tablet personal computing systems (“tablet PCs”).
Because of the great advances in technology, computing systems of today typically enable users to open and interact with numerous electronic documents and/or application programs at any given time, and users expect to have this type of flexibility when using computing systems. For example, users expect to be able to rapidly switch between one document and another, or even rapidly switch between documents open in one application program to documents existing in another. Additionally, users typically will want to move data and information between different documents, even documents existing in different application programs.
Because of the numerous programs and/or documents that can be open and available to a computer user at any given time, it can become easy for the user to forget which programs and/or documents have been opened and are available for use. Thus, users need a way of quickly identifying the documents and/or application programs open on their computer systems at any given time. Moreover, because of the numerous documents and/or applications that may be open at a given time, a user needs to be able to quickly, easily, and accurately navigate through the open applications and/or documents and to quickly locate the specific portion(s) of interest to the user. While conventional scroll bars provide some navigability, their usefulness is rather limited, particularly when one seeks to quickly find a desired page of a lengthy document.
Additionally, hard copy paper documents, in some ways, provide information to readers based simply on the size of the document. For example, when handling a lengthy document, the reader can get a sense of the overall length of the document and/or his position within the document, simply by look and feel. Additionally, readers can quickly navigate around in a paper document by flipping or riffling through the pages, particularly when quickly looking for previously highlighted or noted portions of the document. This concrete sense of position and fast and efficient movement between pages (e.g., through a riffling action) have long been considered advantages of paper documents over their electronic counterparts.
Aspects of the present invention address one or more of the problems identified above.